Joe Carlin thought he knew the harsh exactitude of Vic Wylie’s demands. Hadn’t he already rehearsed for Wylie? But those rehearsals had been for the Sue Davis show at a time when it might never reach a sponsor audition. This was the prelude to a Sue Davis show actually going on the air. In the past Wylie had been an unremitting slave driver. Now he became a sarcastic, sneering, insulting monster. Each hour he seemed to find words that made the last hour’s ordeal seem tame.

“After a season with Vic,” Stella Joyce fluttered, “your skin is gone. You turn to leather.”

You had to be tough, Joe thought, to take it. That first rehearsal was held in an office building quiet with the Sunday hush. Only one elevator was in service. But the suite of Vic Wylie Productions was articulate with the heart-rending echo of the producer’s suffering and anguish.

Beginning at nine o’clock the rehearsal ran, with a few scattered rest periods, until early in the afternoon. Sometimes they spent half an hour on a dozen lines. “No, no,” Wylie moaned. “You’re driving me to murder. I could get away with it, too—nobody’d ever miss you. And if they did discover the bodies I’d get a public vote of thanks. Why do you give me da-da-da-das? I want blood in it. I want it human. I want it to have feeling and life.” Once he took Stella’s part and read a scene. He was a man, and his voice was grotesque in a mother’s rÔle, but he managed to throw a ray of illumination on the part. Every line he spoke took on unexpected possibilities. And once he stormed out and slammed the door, and sulked in the outer office for ten minutes.

The whole cast was assembled—Stella, Joe, an actor named Bert Farr who played the heavy, and two minor characters. Previously, Joe had read from three scattered scripts; to-day he began to get the Sue Davis story. A widow, after the death of her husband, comes with her son to her sole inheritance, a run-down cottage in a small, hidden, mountain village. But plenty of land goes with the cottage, and the dead husband had a passionate faith in its future. Some day a highway would come over the mountain and run past the door. Some day that land, cleared and level, would be the spot for a profitable gas-station tea-room tourist-cabin business. And so the widow and her son struggle to keep the little that is theirs and dream of the day when that little may be great. But a local skinflint, Israel Tice, played by Bert Farr, also knows the potential value of the property and schemes to secure the ownership. That was as far as Curt Lake, the script-writer, had gone.

“What happens later?” Joe asked during one of the rest periods. “Does Sue open a tea-room?”

Wylie snarled: “Worry about the script you’re reading.”

They stopped for lunch and were working again within an hour. The respite seemed to soothe Wylie into amiability. For fifteen or twenty minutes the rehearsal was unruffled and serene. With Joe reading, the producer all at once became a hair-tearing maniac.

“Mo—ther!” His stinging burlesque had just enough of truth to be perfect. “Do we have to have that again? Do you think you’re cast as a babe in arms? Do you want Stella to rock you and lullaby you to sleep? How often do I have to tell you?” A bony forefinger was a spike in Joe’s face. “Give me the ‘Mother’ I want.”

Joe gave it.

At half-past ten they stopped. Circles had formed under Stella’s eyes. Joe’s head was light.

“And I have to go through this for thirteen weeks,” Wylie moaned. “I’m buying coffee and sandwiches. Who’s coming?”

They all went with him. In the restaurant he took a script from the brief-case and pored over it. “Ah!” He was on fire as though this were the beginning of the day. “Suppose we play it this way?” He read a scene, interpreting all the characters and etching the lines with a changed sense of value. But, brain-fagged, they could only goggle at him.

“Don’t ask us to go back,” Bert Farr pleaded. “We’ve been going for almost twelve hours.”

Wylie, smoldering, stuffed the script back into the case. “Nine to-morrow morning.”

“Vic!” Stella protested.

Wylie glared at her.

Stella’s laugh was resigned. “All right, Vic; nine to-morrow.” Waiting with Joe for a bus she said: “This period’s the hardest. After the show’s on a week or two it shakes down and the cast falls into a rhythm.”

Rehearsals became a nightmare. Joe got so he dreamed rehearsals. Rehearsals in the morning until Wylie had to rush off for the first of his two shows; rehearsals after the second show until, sometime in the night, weariness halted them.

Tuesday Curt Lake, the script writer, brought in more script. “How is it going, Vic?”

The producer held his head. “It reeks. I’m afraid to open the windows for fear the city’ll back in a garbage truck.”

Then, on Saturday, Vic Wylie ceased to be a fiend. The rehearsal shifted to Studio B at FKIP, and a sound engineer joined the cast to give the show its sound effects. The producer knew he had molded them as far as they could be molded. What he had now was what he would get Monday. Monday he wanted them easy and relaxed. And so, as they read the opening script three times, he was mild, almost gentle. On Sunday they ran through the script only once.

Joe Carlin no longer stalked the broadcasting stations for a part. The early days of a Wylie show left you time only for Wylie. The need to hunt bread and butter at FKIP was past. He was on an FKIP commercial; he had the station’s attention. Later, he’d call in once a week at FFOM and FWWO. Munson might drop the show after thirteen weeks, and it was wise to make the rounds and keep in touch.

Monday the walls of the Carlin house pressed in upon him and suffocated him. He watched the clock, he kept roaming upstairs and down, he turned the radio on and off. Vic’s two o’clock show was on at FFOM, his four o’clock at FKIP. Sue Davis went on the air at four-thirty. But Wylie would have to walk only from one FKIP studio to another.

How would it go? The house became unbearable. He called: “You won’t forget to listen, Mother?” and was gone. Afterward he was never able to remember whether the day had been clear or drab. Stella Joyce was in Wylie’s inner office reading script.

“Here’s yours, Joe. Vic’s incoherent. He timed the show for a minute opening announcement, but the agency changed to a two-minute Munson plug. Curt Lake had to rewrite script.”

Joe was scared. If Vic tried to jam them through a last minute rehearsal just before they went on....

“No new business,” Stella said. “Curt had to drop lines.”

Joe was relieved. After that he waited with growing impatience. Stella picked up a magazine from Wylie’s desk and turned the pages idly. There was an awful emptiness in the boy’s stomach. Was she watching the time? Presently the actress put the magazine down.

“Joe,” she said impulsively, “I’m glad you’re playing this. If Sonny Baker were in town, Amby would probably have sold him to Munson. Vic would have auditioned him. He might have walked off with it.”

“I followed him in City Boy last season,” Joe said soberly. Against his three months of radio experience, Sonny could show two years. “I thought he was good. Is he?”

Stella nodded. “Quite upstage, but good. Lucille despises him. He’s a show stealer.”

“He won’t steal this one,” said Joe and followed the girl out.

Studio B was dark. Stella turned on lights. The sound engineer’s equipment was already in place. A clock in the control-room told them they had an hour to wait. Bert Farr arrived and was followed by two minor characters.

A page opened the door from the gallery. “Mr. Wylie wants a cast report.”

“All ready,” said Stella.

The afternoon they had given the Munson audition, with listeners in chairs along the walls, chairs and people had seemed to hem them in closely. This afternoon, with only the cast of five present, Studio B was a yawning cavern. Joe felt swallowed up, shrunken, and small. Had the clock stopped? Nervous, he took script from his pocket.

“Don’t do that,” Stella warned. “You’re perfect in the part. You’ll confuse yourself.”

Bert Farr said: “Four o’clock. Vic’s other show’s on.”

Half an hour more! In reception-hall, corridors, elevators, and lobby the Vic Wylie show was coming out of FKIP speakers. Here there was only silence.

The sound engineer arrived. An announcer strolled in and walked about, looking bored.

“The other show’s off,” said Farr.

The tips of Joe’s fingers were ice. If the other show was off, where was Vic?

The control-room began to fill as it fills for an opening. The technician who would regulate volume came in first. Munson arrived with the President and the Vice-President of FKIP. John Dennis was there next with Curt Lake. People gathered in the gallery and stared in through the glass.

Then a storm burst upon them, and the storm was Wylie. His face was lined with strain. “Everybody got the new script?”

Everybody had.

“Watch the control-room. Come in on my signs. Don’t start too fast. You’ll be in the groove in half a minute.”

Wylie was gone, to appear next in the control-room. And now, in the deeper, significant silence, Farr cleared his throat.

A minute to go. To Joe, that became the longest minute he had lived. The cast gathered at the mike. There was a moment when he thought he was choking.

Suddenly the silence was broken. The announcer was reading:

“To-night Munson brings you the opening chapter of Curt Lake’s radio drama, Sue Davis Against the World, the story of a widowed mother’s struggle—”

An incredulous voice cried out in Joe: “You’re on the air!”

It became unbelievable. Actually on the air! And then everything became unreal. Vic Wylie, glaring through the glass panels of the control-room, became a distorted Vic Wylie; the announcer’s voice hung lingeringly in space. Wylie’s commanding finger took on a dreamy haziness. The finger wavered away from the announcer and indicated Stella. Joe’s eyes were wide open and staring as though he were in a trance. In a queer sort of drugged fog he thought: “My cue’s coming.” The finger, as though moving leisurely in a timeless arc, wavered toward him.

He began to read his part. There was no nervousness nor anxiety. There was only that hypnotic sense of unreality:

Mother, don’t shake your head at me like that. You must listen—

He did not know that he had become an automaton. He did not know that he was suffering a form of mike fright that afflicts the young radio performer with an emotional paralysis. But Wylie had pounded at him, rehearsal after rehearsal, until a pattern had been carved deep in his mind. Subconsciously, his mind reproduced that pattern as though it were a platter. He read as Wylie had insisted that he read.

By and by all the dream-world voices were gone, and there was silence. People began to leave the control-room. Joe drew a breath and reality came rushing back upon him. Why, it was over. He’d been on the air—and it was over. All he could remember was fog and haze.

A wise, knowing Vic Wylie, who could be as tender as a woman, was in the studio. “All right now, kid?”

“What—what happened to me?”

“Something that happens to most of them. You came through, and it’ll never happen again.”

Joe wanted to ask a question and didn’t dare.

Wylie didn’t have to be asked. “You were tops, kid.” He smiled at the cast, and his haggard face was lighted. “You were all tops. Get something to eat and report at six.”

“How about all eating together?” Stella asked.

“In a minute,” Joe told her. It was still all unbelievable. He squeezed into a telephone-booth. How could you be tops when you didn’t know what it had all been about? He dialed a number.

“How was it, Mother?”

“Joe!” That was all Kate Carlin could say for a moment.

“Did you like it?”

“It was splendid. Dad wants to speak to you.”

Tom Carlin said gruffly: “Until to-night, Joe, I thought you were making a mistake.”

Joe knew the end of doubt. Then it had been good! Glowing, he pushed back the door. Little Ambrose Carver waited for him ten feet from the booth.

“Congratulations, Joe.”

“Thanks, Amby.” He hadn’t expected this. The glow deepened.

“Does Amby know how to pick them? I’m asking you if I’m a picker.”

“You certainly are.” If Amby wanted to be friends, why not? Joe was in a mood to give friendship to all the world.

“Didn’t I predict you’d go up in lights?” The Carver cane gave a jaunty wriggle. “Don’t forget to tell the Everts-Hall Agency I have a ten per cent piece of you, Joe.”

Joe was deflated. Amby’s wait had been a money wait; Amby might really think he’d laid an egg. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Vic, and Vic said he was tops.

An hour and a half later this same Vic Wylie was savagely, brutally rehearsing the next day’s show and wailing his torment.

“Studio B to-morrow morning for the dress,” he told them finally and dropped into a chair. “You need three more hours of rehearsal. You’re not ready for a dress. What can I do about it? I can’t give you all my time; I have two other shows.” His eyes closed.

“Did you eat?” Stella asked.

The producer’s eyes opened vaguely. “Did I? I forget. Don’t bother me.”

Joe went out and brought back coffee and sandwiches.

“Leave them there,” said Wylie. He had whipped himself back to work and was reading script.

“Eat them now,” Joe insisted. “The coffee’ll get cold.”

“Another one who thinks I need looking after,” Wylie snarled. But he ate. “Kid, don’t pay much attention to me when I blow my top. Everybody in show business is nuts.”

If being nuts was the price of show business success, Joe was willing to be nuts. There was no second attack of mike fright. He came to know a certain tension just before the show and during the broadcast, but that was a quickening excitement that filled him with fire. Studio B became easy, familiar ground, and he was on terms of intimacy with every announcer, and every studio producer in the city.

Life took on a deep, satisfying richness. The radio columns of the Journal gave him attention. He began to get fan mail. Royal Street was paved with gold, and the FKIP Building was a gleaming tower.

But there were others who still walked Royal Street looking for parts; there were actors and actresses who would always be walking Royal Street. Archie Munn had picked up a few bits, in addition to his Sunday show, and was getting by. Lucille Borden, a type player, had found nothing. No station had a show that needed her type.

“Mamma,” she announced casually after Sue Davis had been on a week, “is going to sell hosiery for Mr. Munson. Until a part turns up. Main floor, section twelve—in case you want to buy silk stockings, Joe.”

And Wylie had said she was one of the best. N.B.C. had approved her at a committee audition. Joe blurted: “If I were a producer, you’d be working.”

“Infant,” Lucille said softly, “don’t let it get in your hair. This won’t be the first time I’ve crawled out on a life-line.” She bit her lip. “It probably won’t be the last.”

Joe threw off a wave of bleakness. You couldn’t do anything about it—it was show business. But after that, though each day brought its zest, its rush of wonder, his exhilaration over being on the air was tempered and subdued.

The Sue Davis show clicked. The Everts-Hall Agency compiled figures: the show had caught the public. Munson’s accountants compiled more figures: the show was selling merchandise. A show that clicked both ways might be good for forty weeks.

Joe Carlin became seasoned, seasoned and smooth. At least, he told himself confidently he was becoming smooth. But gradually the restless feet of show people had dulled the bright gold of Royal Street. What had been gold to him, he saw, was merely cold stone pavement to many others. Actors, always glib about the part they expected next week, began to buttonhole him in the corridors of the broadcasting company buildings and lead him into quiet corners. He lent them money. For a week he bought Pop Bartell’s lunch.

“Any day now,” Pop would say, gallant and optimistic, “Tony’ll be calling us into audition for the He people.”

Joe always agreed. He didn’t believe it. Bush-League Larry had been on the fire too long.

October crept toward its end and Indian summer lingered in the city. The afternoon broadcast, the evening rehearsal, the morning dress, fan mail and occasional calls at FFOM and FWWO filled Joe’s day completely. Fan mail was a late development. At first he had answered the letters himself, proud and thrilled. But his mail had grown, and now it was handled from the Everts-Hall Agency on Munson stationery. He hadn’t visited his father’s store in weeks. Show business engrossed him completely. If he thought at all of books and how his father might sell more books the thought was a shadow, gone as quickly as it had come.

Early in November the cast finished a Monday broadcast and was gathering up hats and coats when Wylie walked into Studio B. Usually, the appearance of the producer immediately after a show ended meant that something had gone wrong. The cast waited for the storm.

There was no storm. Wylie said: “Tony tells me Munson’s signing the show for another twenty-six weeks.”

The new contract would carry the show into June. Eight months of freedom from the bread-and-butter hunt! Bert Farr and Stella jitterbugged up and down the studio. Joe pranced to the piano shoved into a corner and banged out a one-finger melody. People gathered in the gallery. But they were used to people gaping in through the glass; they forgot they were there.

A page opened the studio door. “Telephone, Mr. Wylie. Your office.”

Wylie left them. After that the celebration died down. Joe was slipping into a top-coat when a voice, cracked and high-pitched, swung him around.

“Kid!” Wylie was wild-eyed. “Munson’s closes in ten minutes. Get a message to Lucille. N.B.C. wants her. A contract. She’s hit the jackpot.”

“Vic!” Stella cried.

Joe was already on his way. Lucille Borden without a part in small-time radio; Lucille Borden, hungry; Lucille Borden behind a counter selling stockings. And then, when nobody expected it, Lucille Borden in the big time. Show business! The down elevator stopped at every floor and passengers took their time getting on and off. Joe stewed. The Munson store was only half a block away but, reaching the street, he ran.

Lucille Borden, arranging boxes of hosiery, smiled at him. “Stockings, Infant? Don’t tell me you have a sweetie?”

Words poured from Joe. “N.B.C. wants you. They called Vic’s office.”

The smile was gone. “Another audition?”

“A part. The show sold. You’re in, Lu.”

Lucille Borden’s hands gripped the edge of the counter; the knuckles turned white. She said slowly: “At last.”

As though in celebration of Lucille’s triumph, the morrow dawned in golden splendor; but as Joe rode downtown the day became clouded and gray. The dress rehearsal at Studio B went off without a hitch.

“Kid,” Wylie said, “Lu leaves on the three o’clock.”

Joe stopped at the Everts-Hall Agency to sign the fan mail replies. Lucille Borden on a coast-to-coast! One of Wylie’s people. If you were good enough for Wylie.... The pen that wrote “Joe Carlin” wasn’t steady. He was one of Wylie’s people.

Walking into Wylie’s office and finding Lucille, Stella, and Archie Munn already there brought back the long, idle days of the summer when they had always been together. In the rush of eager talk yesterday’s hard road was forgotten; nobody thought of lunch. Stella, called for an audition at FFOM, was the first to leave; Archie, with a bit on a two o’clock FWWO show, soon followed. Joe carried Lucille’s bags to the station.

“I’ll be listening,” he said. “Not only the opening—every day.”

“Infant,” Lucille said with a catch in her voice, “I’m going to miss my old gang.”

A mist was falling when Joe came out of the station. Then, while he was still two blocks from the FKIP Building, the skies opened and the mist became a torrent of rain. Royal Street broke into confusion with everybody running and getting in everybody else’s way. A river poured down upon him. Wet and cold, he reached Studio B.

The studio was warm. He would, Joe decided, jump home when the show ended, change, and hurry back for the evening rehearsal; but by the time Sue Davis Against the World signed off his chill had passed and he went to supper with Stella. For once the evening rehearsal was short. The cast sat around for an hour, and Vic sat with them, and they talked of Lucille Borden and the big time. Joe’s clothing had dried.

He awakened to a new day with the early sun in his eyes. He said aloud: “I’m hungry enough to eat—” The words died away, and he lay rigid. Had that hoarse rasp come from him? He said again: “I’m hungry enough—” His body broke out in a sweat. At nine o’clock, worried and shaken, he walked into Wylie’s office.

“Vic.” His voice was down to a whisper.

Vic Wylie’s face paled. “You got wet yesterday,” he croaked, and then he went into a frenzy. “Miss Robb! Dr. Zinn—twelfth floor. I’m coming right up.” He dragged Joe toward the hall. Twenty minutes later he was back, a wild-eyed lunatic. “Get Curt Lake.”

The stenographer made the call. “No answer,” she reported.

The producer pounded her desk. “Find him; find him.”

Miss Robb “found” him. Curt Lake arrived out of breath.

“Laryngitis,” the producer croaked. “The house sold out and the kid gets laryngitis. The part’s got to be dropped. I’ve got to have new script. You see what time it is?”

The script-writer whipped out of his coat. “Two o’clock, Vic?”

“With the show going on at four-thirty? Can I send them on cold? I want script at noon.”

“Noon? Do you think I pick ideas out of the air? You’ll want another script to-night for to-morrow.”

“Do I get script or do I get an alibi?” Wylie screamed.

Radio’s absolute master, the clock, was goading them with pressure and tension. Come high water or low, storm or calm, sickness or health, at four-thirty the Munson show had to go on.

Miss Robb appeared and closed the inner office door. Joe thought with useless regret: “If I hadn’t gone to the train....” Curt Lake was scowling and Wylie was glaring.

Suddenly Wylie was halfway across the desk. “How is this, Curt? In the story you’ve had this son soaking stamps off discarded envelopes, pasting them in an album—”

The script-writer swung around eagerly. “That’s it, Vic. Last night we left them in a bad way. Almost broke, and the guy that wants the property putting on the pressure. The son’s desperate. He decides to take his stamp collection to a dealer in the city, two hundred miles away. He’s already gone when the script opens—”

“A kid without money? How you going to get him there? Pullman?”

“Can’t he hike? Can’t he thumb rides?”

“Are you nuts? Don’t you know hitch-hiking’s in bad? Do you want the Woman’s Club and the P.T.A. on our necks?”

“Do you want a script?” Curt Lake shouted. “Put him on a bus and he’s there to-day and home to-morrow. How long is Joe’s throat going to keep him out? How many miles does a hitch-hiker make? It’s all luck, isn’t it—who picks him up and how far they’re going. We can string it along as far as you need it. If Joe’s throat takes a week he’s away a week. He sends back post cards to his mother. He’s off stage, but we keep the spot on him.”

“What’s your curtain?”

“Rain. Some swell sound effects. Night and mother alone. She opens the door and listens to the rain. Buckets of rain. You get it, Vic? ‘Where is my wandering boy to-night?’”

“I get it,” Wylie snarled. “The last script-writer who used it was shot. He deserved it.” He clawed for his hat, clawed for his coat, clawed for the half-open, bulging brief-case. “It’s corny,” he groaned from the door, “but it’s a script.”

Curt Lake stormed out to Miss Robb. “Does he expect me to give him an Orson Welles show in an hour and fifty minutes?”

“You’ll give him a script, won’t you, Mr. Lake?”

“Vic?” The man was amazed at the question. “I’d give him my right arm.”

It was madly unbelievable, fantastic and unreal—and yet so very real. It was show business.

Curt Lake paced the inner office. He sat before the typewriter, pecked at the keys, paced restlessly once more. He ripped off his tie. He drummed on the window, swore fervently, and opened his shirt. Suddenly he was back at the machine and talking to himself. His fingers began to pound. When he finished, shortly before noon, he had a pile of manuscript.

Joe asked in a hoarse whisper: “Script finished?”

“Script?” Curt Lake’s voice was thick with scorn. “It’s tripe.”

Listening to the Sue Davis show come out of Vic Wylie’s radio that afternoon, Joe suffered. It was tripe. There was no spice, no spirit, no punch. Lines and speeches that went on and on until they had gone on for thirteen and a half minutes. Then they stopped. Vic was right; the curtain was corny. He shut off the radio and went home.

Kate Carlin brought him a glass of hot milk. “Throat pain much, Joe?”

He shook his head. There was no pain. That was the maddening phase.

“Did I imagine the show was bad to-day?”

“It was very bad.” Talk was an effort. “They had to build a new script in a hurry. To-morrow’ll be better.”

To-morrow was no better. He sat in on the dress, and it was torture not to be at the mike reading the Dick Davis part. It was torture to listen to dialogue that had become lifeless and spiritless. Vic Wylie’s eyes seemed sunken.

“Five minutes after we signed off last night,” Stella Joyce fluttered, “Amby Carver was around wanting to know what had happened. He knew the script had been fluffed up with an egg-beater.”

“Amby’s worried about his ten per cent,” Joe whispered bitterly. Amby, his agent, hadn’t bothered to phone him.

Wylie, strained, came from the control-room and drew him aside. “Kid, stay away. I know how you feel, but worry won’t get you anything. The script’s blue, the cast’s blue, and your face’s as long as four Sundays. Forget radio until you clear up. Interest yourself in something else. Read a book, steal a car, make a mud pie. Do anything so long as it isn’t radio. See me Saturday.”

Vic had said to read a book. Books flashed a picture before Joe of his father’s business. He tried to force his mind to dwell on how the Thomas Carlin store could sell more books. Fifty thousand listeners! What could you say that would make them book-hungry? Thomas Carlin Presents To-day’s Book. Curt Lake had been right, too. You couldn’t snip an idea out of the air; you couldn’t deliberately dig up an idea as you would a garden bulb. Thomas Carlin Presents.... The effort died in failure. His mind refused to freshen, to come alive.

A mound of letters awaited him at the Everts-Hall Agency. He signed them and rode dully out to the Northend.

That afternoon’s broadcast was worse than the dress. The continuity of the show had been broken, and weak, forced, hack-toiled scripts had demoralized the cast. Stella Joyce sank with the others.

“Vic doesn’t want me to come to the rehearsals until I’m better,” Joe said at supper in a hoarse whisper.

“Isn’t that wise?” Kate Carlin asked.

“Joe!” Tom Carlin picked his words carefully. “Is there any chance of another actor being called in for the part?”

Joe didn’t want to think of that.

Lying in bed, wakeful, he had to think of it. He tried to think of it coldly and calmly, as though he weren’t thinking about Joe Carlin at all but about somebody else. They’d have to get a juvenile for the part. What man could play the part of a young high-school boy? A man’s voice, deepened and matured, would be a give-away; the mother-son illusion would be shattered. Certainly they couldn’t find a juvenile in this city. Amby had told him once that local radio was strangely shy of juveniles who were tops, and he had since found this to be true. Last season Sonny Baker had been here and Sonny had skimmed the cream. This season it was Joe Carlin. He’d have had the lead in Bush-League Larry had the show sold. He was playing opposite Stella Joyce in Sue Davis. Who else was there?

The answer was plain—nobody. Would they bring somebody down from New York? But what juvenile, with a chance to make the big time, would come here to play in a five-dollar-a-day show? And again the answer was—nobody.

Joe Carlin thought: “I’m in luck. They’ll have to wait for my voice to come back.”

Friday’s show was so painful he could not bear to hear it to the end.

“When do you see the doctor again?” his mother asked.

“To-morrow.”

He was at Dr. Zinn’s door before the door was open. He sat in a darkened room and a beam of light illuminated his throat.

“Better,” the doctor pronounced cheerfully. “Much better. Very much better.”

“My voice isn’t any better,” Joe whispered.

“Sometimes these attacks prove stubborn. Once the voice begins to regain its strength improvement is rapid. You must give it time.”

“How much time?”

“Another week—perhaps ten days. Nature does her own healing; she can’t be rushed.”

Ten more days meant ten more scripts in which Curt Lake held the broken threads of a show and tried to patch with the wrong colors.

“Can’t you rush this a little, Doctor?”

“Now, my boy, you mustn’t be impatient,” the doctor answered tolerantly.

Joe wondered what Dr. Zinn would think of patience if he were a radio actor out of a show that was going to pieces. Vic Wylie’s office was locked. The boy went to the Everts-Hall Agency. There were only three letters to be signed.

“Tony wants to see you,” the publicity department told him.

Genial Tony Vaux was no longer the hail-fellow-well-met who boomed jovially. He was quiet and thoughtful, almost reserved. “How’s the throat coming, Joe?”

Joe shook his head.

“The He people have finally come around to it. They want an audition Monday.”

“I can’t give a good show Monday, Tony. You know what I can do when my voice is right.”

Tony scratched his chin. “The He people don’t.”

“But they won’t go on the air for another couple of weeks.”

Tony continued to scratch his chin. “When a sponsor buys a show, he buys what he hears. You can’t sell him a package by telling how good it will be in two weeks. Why isn’t it good to-day?”

“What time Monday, Tony? I might—” There was no need to finish. Tony seemed to have withdrawn into some further reserve.

“I’ll give you a call, Joe.”

Joe thought: “You may have to.” When Wylie told a man he was tops, he was tops. Where would they find another juvenile who was tops?

This time the knob on the door of Vic Wylie Productions turned. Miss Robb’s desk was closed. The inner office door was open and Joe heard voices. With a shock of amazement he recognized his own voice, Stella’s voice, Bert Farr’s voice. Recognition widened and amazement grew. This was one of the early scripts of the Sue Davis show. What—? He walked to the door.

Wylie, his chin sunk in the palm of one hand, glumly listened to the playing of a platter. Two minutes, three minutes passed and the script reached its curtain. The shut-off clicked and the platter ceased to revolve.

“Kid, what did the doctor say?” Wylie had not moved.

Joe whispered: “A week or ten days. What’s that?”

“Wylie insurance.” The producer was harsh. “I can’t afford to leave myself out on a limb. Suppose some member of the cast falls under a truck. Can I bring in a new actor and tell him I want him to read like So-and-so? Perhaps he’s never heard So-and-so. I give him So-and-so. Every once in a while I cut a platter. The cast never knows it’s being cut. When I have to recast, the new member of the cast gets a platter diet. Again and again, hour after hour. That’s his part; that’s the voice the audience associates with the part. When he goes on the air, not one in a thousand suspects a new voice.”

Joe’s breathing was rapid and shallow.

Wylie brooded. “Kid, Munson’s dishing out the ice. He says the show’s slipping. It is. It’s doing a nose dive. Five thousand radios have tuned us out in the last three days. When they start to yawn and tune in another station, it’s almost time to ring down the curtain. I don’t like to hand this to you, kid, but you got to get it straight. Show business pays off to the winner. You can’t have bacon and eggs without the bacon. You can’t have a mother-and-son without the son. Munson bought a mother-and-son show. He’s not getting it.”

Joe stared at the platter and was cold. Tony, and now Vic! If he lost the Dick Davis part he’d be making the rounds again, haunting the offices of casting directors, putting on a nice new front every morning.

“Who are you getting, Vic?”

Wylie took his hand away from his chair. “No Baltimore nephew, anyway,” he snarled.

Joe was no longer cold. He had figured the set-up, and he had figured it correctly. Vic had nobody in mind. Tony might fish around and be content to do the best he could with a part, but not Vic. Vic never compromised. You were tops or you wouldn’t do. Where was Vic going to find a juvenile he’d rate tops? Perhaps he’d throw somebody in the part for a week for the sake of the story, so that Munson would have a mother-and-son show. But even a week of that would gripe the violent, temperamental producer.

Royal Street was crowded; Royal Street sparkled. Archie Munn stood in front of the FKIP Building talking to a tall, languid young man who wore his clothing with a careless, studied indifference. Joe nodded and passed, and stopped at the corner to buy a Journal. He was waiting for change when Archie overtook him.

“Better buy two copies, Joe. They give Lu a nice notice.”

Joe bought a second copy and nodded back toward the FKIP Building. “Show business?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Yes.”

“A newcomer?”

“Not exactly.”

“I don’t remember having seen him before. Who is he?”

Archie Munn’s deep voice was level and dry. “Sonny Baker. Amby rushed him back from the coast. He got in this morning.”